![]() A judge has us repeat the vows, to have, to hold, till death, the end. I learned to fight away the harsh words I had always tormented myself with.Īt City Hall, my details are in the groom column, though we are to each other wives. I began to believe in myself, I wrote more. People said I was nicer when I was with N. In time, I noticed that a change had come over me, a softness that grew as she burrowed into my life. I had spent my life being bored by people, but of N., I never tired. She didn’t give a damn for convention, actively sought out the other. She had published two books of poetry, but her poem tattoo had a punctuation error, something she showed me the first time we met, both of us laughing as she pulled up her T-shirt to show me her slender naked back. She had spent two years researching in a military special-forces training site, but she only wore cowboys boots, didn’t own a rain jacket. ![]() She complained of feeling cold, but her body burned with a heat that felt electric to touch. She was brought to tears by blossoming trees, and by Marx. She captivated me, the way she seemed to be one thing, but also another. N., a poet, and I met in a writing program at grad school two years before, and were within days talking of a life together. I hadn’t dreamed of getting married either-I had watched my parents suffer their own twenty-four years before divorcing-and by the morning of our wedding I am forty. Only my wife understands me in this new strange country where I didn’t mean to end up. I know I should use the American terms for things-trash, truck, fall-but it isn’t a reflex yet. My wife, to-be, throws a leg into my sprawled crook, insists her body into the shape of mine so that her beating heart, tiny, hot, thrums against my scapula. The night before our City Hall wedding, we sleep with the windows thrown open.Īt 5 a.m., the bin lorry wakes us as it thunders past our bedroom. The woods, though I scour them, give up nothing to me. ![]() Horn of plenty, birch bolete, chicken of the woods, cep.īut in Philadelphia, the days are a humid stench that won’t let up. There, it is the season I gather mushroom’s from the woods, when the cool wet weather pulses black trumpets from the loam. On the island in Scotland, where I am from, at this time of year I sleep under one, two, thick quilts, and rain slants sideways across the windows. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street. Summer flowers-petunias, fuchsias, geraniums-gush from other people’s window ledges. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong.
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